04:25 PM My cousin David is now the proud older brother of Margarita Claire Mangubat, who was born this past Thursday. I accompanied my parents to the hospital for a visit yesterday and managed to see her at the nursery (through a pane of glass, though). That would mean that when she hits 19 years of age, I'll be 38, and gosh, that's old! Ü She's a sweet little thing, and David absolutely adores her, which boggled my mind for a minute because I'd never seen him that affectionate for anyone before.

My maternal grandparents arrived from Bacolod yesterday to greet their newest grandchild, and they also brought news that my eldest male cousin has married his girlfriend of many years. I have to say I'm not exactly jumping for joy at the thought that that girl has joined our family, but at least she won't be skulking around unofficially anymore. That brings me to the thought of them having a baby. I could be an aunt in a few years' time.

Grandma also gave me a cookbook of hers, since she noted my interest in learning the culinary arts. Interesting things about the cookbook: it was published during Marcos' "Bagong Lipunan" (New Society) era, it's a Filipino production but written in (slightly ungrammatical) English, and it uses vegemeat and gluten as meat substitutes in its recipes. I had no idea that the idea of vegetarianism existed in the Philippines during that time, and it's a pity I'm an enthusiastic carnivore. Ü

While we're on the subject of yesterday, did anyone watch the MTV VMA 2002 show last night? I must say it was kinda so-so, although I liked Justin Timberlake's solo performance and Shakira's belly-dancing. One thing that disgusted me in particular was Christina Aguilera's faux Brooklyn accent and "Wassup?" attitude. "And da winnah ee-uhs..." She looked like such a poseur.

04:46 PM I was educated in a School of Tomorrow-affiliated school, somewhat similar to the Montessori system because students use individual workbooks and are free to work at their own pace. Because of this, we used to write down how many pages of each workbook we could finish in a day; it was called "setting your goals." Since I had gone to a conventional school for my first two years of grade school, I didn't have to adjust too much to the way my college subjects were taught. However, in my personal life sometimes I still need to write down the things I have to do. Unfortunately, I have never adopted the practice of using a day planner, so things can get pretty messed up. Hence, I might put up a "To Do" list next month in my sidebar. Heaven knows I remember everything I put up on the internet. Ü

I was watching Sesame Street just for kicks this afternoon, and I remember it being a pretty tame show. I guess being nine years old the last time I watched it means I never picked up on the hidden nuances in it, and I never realized how much bad behavior one could pick up simply by observing how smart-alecky Ernie is. It's not just Ernie I have issues about; the puppets, and even the humans can be rather condescending towards each other. The characters that populate Sesame Street can be quite snappish and irritable, inconvenienced by Big Bird's naivete or Elmo's curiosity or any other puppets' enthusiasm. I thought Sesame Street was a perfect children's program, but now I'm not even so sure I'd let my future kids watch it. All I can say is that it taught me excellent English.

09:40 AM It's almost the end of the month of August, and I'm looking at a paper and an exam on September 2. Good grief! Why didn't I start reading when I had all that spare time last week, and the week before that? It's because I've been agonizing over my graduate studies application. I seem to have an incapacitating fear of dealing with people. Perhaps I'm still trying to get over the trauma from my dealings with Ms. P__, my teacher during the first two years of high school, and Ma'am C__, one of my professors last semester, as well as the unpredictable people I've met through the years. I'm afraid of getting blasted at for being inept or disrespectful, or even for disturbing them with my timing.

I know I've got to deal with this, because it's starting to extend into simple cash dealings with cashiers and waiters. I can't approach any counter all by myself, and somehow I kept reinforcing this behavior by always manipulating a friend of mine to come with me to do things like paying fees, registering for classes, or even ordering food. This semester the situation's different: I don't have constant companions anymore, and I can't drag my dad around for support all the time. People will say, "It's time you grew up, Noelle." I guess so.

06:07 PM Anyone who's ever been down in the dumps might share my feeling of needing someone to talk to. Last Friday morning, I felt like my entire world imploded. I felt confused and frenzied, pressured to make a life-changing decision quickly. I wanted to hide in a corner and just cry out to God for help; He's always been there for me, but there simply wasn't a place to be by myself on campus. To add to my worsening feelings about my situation that day, my mother was out of town, and I knew that she would understand what I needed at that time. I needed someone to listen to me, someone to empathize with me, someone to comfort me. I needed to get things off my chest; I didn't want to think about the next step I had to take just yet.

There was just no way I could get any catharsis. In frustration, I began writing my feelings down on paper. Then it struck me that if other people used painting as an outlet for their emotions, I used writing in the same way. It's been that way ever since I encountered a period of depression during my early high school years; when I couldn't talk to anyone about my problems, I turned to writing little bits of poetry. Reading them now, I find that they're the most intense and the most creative things I've ever done.

I'm somewhat recovered from Friday's episode, but now I keep thinking: how should I turn my writing to good use?

02:06 AM It looks like Charles' statement concerning the predominance of JRR Tolkien's and CS Lewis' works in the fantasy genre has struck a dissonant chord among some Tolkien enthusiasts I've recently become acquainted with. You should know by now that you can't just say something in your blog and not explain why you said it.

Of course, his statement provoked a reaction from people. Knowing him, I wouldn't expect otherwise. However, the newer fantasy authors, whom he thinks are in (what seems to me to be a nonexistent) rivalry with Tolkien and Lewis, have gained mainstream acceptance in the first place because of Tolkien and Lewis' groundwork. Perhaps Charles was thinking of fantasy writing as akin to science: Einstein's theory of distortions in space-time superseded Newton's theory on the law of gravity. Ü

The fact remains that Tolkien and Lewis are the ones to beat in the field of fantasy writing. It's not because they're "in" right now that a lot of people are rediscovering and obsessing over their works, although that's one way that newer fans like myself have gotten hooked. Rather, these two writers have created imaginary worlds so rich and full of detail that anyone with a decent imagination and the stomach for epics are almost convinced that these worlds exist(ed) in some form at some point in time. Although there are other great authors out there, the success of these two Inklings at stirring the minds and hearts of their readers is probably the gauge-mark by which modern fantasy writers judge the success of their own works--and it's probably why a person reading The Lord of the Rings or The Chronicles of Narnia for the first time finds a place in his or her life for these fifty-year-old texts, even in the year 2002.

09:02 PM Out on the service road, heavy traffic is plaguing motorists, and my mother is among them. The reason? I saw someone wearing a motorcycle helmet lying in a pool of his own blood, the area cordoned off; I thought, "there's been a fatal motorcycle accident." Yes, it was fatal. Yes, it involved a motorcycle. But it was no accident. With the traffic moving as slowly as it was during rush hour, there was no way that he could have been going fast enough to be sideswiped by some truck; even if that were the case, the body would have been carted off hours ago. Instead they're probably still waiting for forensic experts to arrive at the scene (and the experts have probably been held up by the same traffic the body's causing). My dad reasoned that the motorcyclist must have been shot, and a gas station attendant confirmed it for us.

We were at that same intersection two hours before that, and we'd seen a guy in an owner Jeep brandishing a fire-arm. The nerve of some people--they bring guns with them but don't have the self-control to stop themselves from firing because of a minor traffic altercation. Suddenly I don't feel safe anymore, not even in my own car.

06:47 PM Well, our helpers made it home safely, but not before we almost decided to file a missing persons report. Turns out that one of them had called a sister of hers who took them home. Anyway, I'm sorry you readers had to see me rant like that; it was petty of me to bear a grudge against my parents for wanting to take me with them, and even more petty of me to put it here.

My friend Vanessa discovered this journal yesterday. I should probably say "re-discovered" because I showed this to her once before I moved it to Dijurido.net. Unlike some people, I actualy enjoy knowing that my online journal is read by people I know. Of course, my offline journal is another matter. Ü

06:25 AM I can't believe this. I'm not supposed to be awake at this time, but our two domestic helpers didn't come home last night and my parents don't want to leave me alone in the house. I think I'm capable of handling more than six hours without my parents or sister, since last May that was the case, but my parents didn't even consider giving me a choice whether to come with them or to tough it out here in the house.

I'm amazed by my parents' lack of trust in me--or alternatively, by their protectiveness. I'm 19 years old in a guarded subdivision and they won't let me out of their sight. I made my case to them a while ago that I didn't have to go, and it was like they were even upset that I wanted to take on this responsibility.

When those two helpers come home I don't know what I'll do. I was supposed to use this extra time to sleep in, exercise, and think about the things I have to do for the week, not to mention I was supposed to write the essay for my graduate studies application, but it looks like I'm going elsewhere today.

06:39 PM The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring has come out on VHs, DVD, and VCD, so I was all eager to go out and get it for the added scenes. Turns out there's an even longer extended version DVD, which is due later this year, so I'll wait for that. In the meantime my parents are scouting for the cheapest high-quality DVD player on the market, and even they agree with their LOTR-addicted daughter (me) that a LOTR DVD is the way to go, instead of a VCD. Just think of all the additional goodies! Mental note: get the widescreen version, not the fullscreen version, so nothing from what we saw in the theater is cut off the screen. Ü

11:32 AM I took a quiz today: Which Queen Amidala Outfit Are You?. I'm the Celebration Gown, and to prove it, here's a picture of me in the gown, courtesy of Photoshop and a little craziness.

Anyway, I woke up today with smoke pouring in through our living room windows. Turns out that our next door neighbor (the one who plays his radio too loudly) was burning something in his front yard. The smoke's stopped now, but I had to shut all our windows because the smoke was really bad at one point. Pesky neighbors. Everybody has them.

10:08 PM Just a short note to say that I listed this site on Blogtree.com, a service that tracks which blogs inspired which blogs. Ambergris is Lime Rain's child. Ü

07:39 PM I finished The Silmarillion last night, and I'm still in a haze from it. It's like how I felt after reading The Solitaire Mystery by the writer of Sophie's World; I felt like I'd gone through a rabbit hole, in an Alice-in-Wonderland way. You see, I visualize what I read so vividly--in terms of how the characters and places would look and in what period of time on Earth they lived--that for a short time after I read something I almost believe I'm inhabiting the book's imaginary world.

Short-order news:

• Classes were suspended from 11:45 a.m. today thanks to the heavy rain that descended on Metro Manila. It was strange to see the sky so dark and yet have my watch read "10:30 a.m." Ü
• I met Macy a few weeks ago at our campus when she introduced herself to me, and last Friday she accompanied Jeifan (our mutual friend) to the place where our teacher screened Chicken Rice War for our class, although Macy didn't stay for the film.
• I keep getting Google hits for Mandy Moore's new hairstyle. Sorry guys, I don't have pictures here. What I do have is a picture of myself from two months ago, trying to copy Mandy Moore's short hair.

10:30 AM Then Noelle cried: "Yé! Utúvienyes! I have found it! Lo! here is JRR Tolkien's The Silmarillion at Powerbooks, selling at a store-wide 20% discount!"

Pardon the gushing, but I've been looking for this book ever since I finished reading The Lord of the Rings. If LOTR is a story of Middle-Earth from the point of view of Hobbits, Silma is the history of Middle-Earth from the Elves' point of view. It is more stately, in the vein of Norse legends (which I've read long before), and it is so beautiful, once you get used to Tolkien's verbosity--that's part of its beauty as well.

I haven't finished reading it yet; it's so packed with details that I just keep trying to visualize everything, from the hidden city of Gondolin to Valinor, land of the Valar. Excuse me while I return to my daydreaming. Ü

09:14 AM I found a copy of some old poems I wrote in my org's logbook two years ago. The poems are angry, or sad, or tumultuous--negative feelings I was able to tap into at the time, although I'd never been depressed. It seems so strange now to look back and think, "Was life really that difficult?"

Perhaps human beings feel pain more acutely than pleasure, or we remember it better. Why is it that people with Alzheimer's only remember their sad memories? Pain is so much a part of our daily life that when something good comes along, we don't know how to express ourselves, and we're so engrossed in enjoying that one moment of happiness that we don't care to record it. Painful situations, on the other hand, need to be worked out. For some people, their outlet is prose and poetry.

01:19 PM I finally got through my backlog of papers and exams yesterday, when I took my Comm 100 midterm. My teacher is a fairly easygoing guy, but those right-minus-wrong exams are really unfair. He says he needs to do that because he creates a grading curve according to how our grades are spread; otherwise all of us might cluster at the top end of the grading scale. I don't see what's wrong with most of us getting 1's (our equivalent to an A), but he seems to believe that he has to flunk a few students every semester.

My Comparative Lit class was really interesting yesterday. We're studying Singaporean contemporary literature, so our teacher showed us a film called Chicken Rice War to illustrate the attitudes of Singaporeans toward life, the government, and culture. I must say I was more fascinated in how funny the film was. I have to find that movie somewhere, because we had to fast-forward a few scenes. The characters generally talked in Singlish, but we had subtitles (and I must admit I'm curious about Singlish after Time wrote on how Singapore is launching a new program to encourage Standard English speaking). Ü

I'm going to go post at the RBJ Boards now. I ranked number 69 on the Top 100, but it looks like everything was reset. I must say that Rice Bowl Journals has changed the way I use the web. I never used to post in bulletin boards before, but now I find I like it a lot. There goes the next 20 hours of prepaid time. Ü

11:50 AM Currently on a study break. I'll be back next week. Ü